British emigration to Armorica seems to have begun in a small way soon after 300. During the crisis that shook the Roman empire in the mid third century, Frankish and Saxon pirate raids hit Armorica hard. Pollen samples from peat bogs in Finistere point to a decline of agriculture and a corresponding advance of woodland. Many coastal villas and other settlements were abandoned; others survived in much reduced circumstances. The fish salting industry collapsed. Coin hoarding, a classic sign of insecurity, increased and the impoverished peasantry turned to brigandage. When stability finally began to return c. 300 there was a modest economic recovery. Some of the sites abandoned during the crisis were reoccupied by people who used pottery from southern Britain, while a mid-fourth-century cemetery at St Urnel (Finistere) contained skeletal types more closely resembling those of south-west England and south-west Wales than the native Armoricans. Armorica had become depopulated during the third century, so this limited British settlement may have been encouraged by landlords desperate to attract new tenants. No contemporary writer noticed the arrival of these newcomers, but in his famous History of the Kings of Britain, the twelfth-century author Geoffrey of Monmouth records the legend of Conan Meriadec. Conan was a British noble who went to the continent with the Roman emperor Magnus Maximus in 383 and was granted Armorica as a reward for his loyalty. The Britons slaughtered the locals and repopulated the province with 100,000 settlers and 30,000 soldiers who were brought over from Britain, turning Armorica into ‘a second Britain’. There is no independent evidence that Conan was a real historical person - and the massacre of native Armoricans certainly never happened - but many Britons did serve in the Roman army on the continent in the fourth century so there may be some kind of factual basis to the story. Armorica’s recovery began to run out of steam c. 350, economic decline set in again, and by the end of the century most, if not all, villas had been abandoned, this time for good. Then, soon after 410, the Armoricans, ‘emulating the example of the Britons’ across the Channel who had just expelled the Roman administration, rebelled against Roman rule and set up their own government. It did not last long. The Roman general Exuper-antius recovered control in 417 but, while Rome retained nominal control until the 460s, Armorica collapsed into ungovernable anarchy in the 420s as a result of repeated peasant rebellions.
The hundred years or so between the mid fifth century and mid sixth century are critical, for they saw the main wave of British immigration, which transformed Armorica into Brittany. Yet our sources ofinformation are so meagre that we do not even know for certain if the British settlement was a mainly violent or peaceful process. There seem to have been two waves of migration. The first had taken place by the 460s under the leadership of a king called Riothamus. This may have taken place with the agreement of the Romans, as Riothamus was an ally of the emperor Anthemius against the Visigoths. A second and more sustained migration took place in the first half of the sixth century. Later traditions recorded in the vitae (religious biographies) of early Breton saints suggest that this migration was organised by aristocrats with close links to the royal family of Dumnonia, a British kingdom roughly comprising modern Devon and Cornwall. By the later sixth century three main regional powers had emerged; Cornouaille (Cornovia) in the west; Broerech, named after its founder Waroc, in the south-east; and in the north Domnonee (Dumnonia), which long preserved its political and social ties with its namesake across the sea. The migration was accompanied by a major movement of British clergy - most of them from South Wales - who introduced the practices of the Celtic church. The vitae tell of priests and monks, such as St Paul Aurelian, founding churches and monasteries on the sites of abandoned villas and deserted Roman towns inhabited only by wild animals. Others, following the tradition of the peregrini, sought out wild and remote islands for their settlements.
The Britons had a similar material culture and way of life to the Armoricans so it has proved difficult for archaeologists to identify any of their settlements. The most important evidence of the British settlement comes, therefore, from place names. The similarities between Breton and Cornish and Welsh place names are immediately obvious, even to a non-linguist. Common Breton place-name elements of British origin include Plou (Welsh plwyf, ‘people’), Lan (Welsh Ilan, ‘church’), tre (Welsh tref, a subdivision of a parish), ker (Welsh caer, ‘hamlet’), coet (Welsh coed, wood) and lis or lez (Welsh llys, a hall, i. e. the residence of a notable person). These British-influenced place-name elements are concentrated in northern and western Brittany and probably give a good idea of where British settlement was concentrated. In the south-east place names derived from Gaulish are common, suggesting that there was little British settlement there. The British settlement is evidenced not only in place names, of course, but also in the Breton language itself, which is closely related to Welsh and Cornish.
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